Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee OM KBE Tim Berners-Lee is a British engineer and computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web, making the first proposal for it in 1989. He is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a web standards organisation, and also a Director of the World Wide Web Foundation, which furthers the potential of the web to benefit humanity. Sir Tim is a Professor of Engineering at MIT as well as a professor in the Electronics and Computer Science department at the University of Southampton. In 2009 he began to work with the UK government to help make data more open and accessible. He and Professor Nigel Shadbolt are the 2 leading figures behind data.gov.uk, the online portal designed to open up almost all public sector data for free re-use. Sir Tim is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the recipient of several international awards.